The Buie Knife

Social Media Revolution 2013

Watch this directly on Youtube.com

Erik Qualman, the creator of this video, has certainly generated curiosity about himself. I've now Googled him and checked out his Wikipedia profile. He's coined a word, "socialnomics: word of mouth on digital steroids."

The video is a good promotion for the growing importance of social media: "90% of consumers trust peer recommendations," compared to only 14% who trust advertising. 

And I want to know more about how "we will no longer search for products and services...they will find us via social media."

I do think there's still a tangible sales pitch to be done on the ROI on social media, not simply that, as Qualman says, the ROI "is that your business will still exist in five years."

The quick factoids in this video raise a lot of questions:

Online Neighborhoods in U.S. Have 8 Million Participants, Tens of Thousands of Hosts

I labored in the field of online neighborhood development from 1997 to 2005. I thought for sure the phenomenon would take off as a way to give neighborhoods a greater sense of community and more civic power or empowerment. In my own neighborhood of Takoma Park, MD., I saw how much difference a wired neighborhood could make. Maybe the phenomenon did take off, under the radar. Steven Clift of E-Democracy.org, who has had a vision of electronic democracy even longer than I have, posted data hidden in the a Pew Internet survey indicating that EIGHT MILLION Americans now participate in online neighborhoods. He's also suggesting that list managers share best practices. Check out his blog. For my many observations on best and worst practices, see the Online Neighborhoods section of this blog. 

BTW, Facebook now has 400 million members, and still growing. There's no question that it has added a new dimension to online communities, indeed it may be the "killer application" that actually implements the vision for the e-world outlined by Howard Rheingold in his book, "Virtual Community" in 1993.

Online Tools Won Recent Elections for GOP

As someone who has worked on online political, advocacy and journalistic projects since the early 1990s and closely studied the medium's impact in creating "electronic democracy," it's good to see the Internet finally come of age. Republican consultants assert they won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, and off-year governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey by mobilizing the national GOP base online, and their candidates' supporters down to the precinct level. There is little doubt that the Internet won Barack Obama the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, if not the election, and that 2008 was the fated "Internet election." But if the political parties now (or by the fall 2010 elections) have effectively achieved parity in technological sophistication, which one has the advantage? The party that can energize its base and get out the vote, probably. Or maybe the party that embraces some new cutting edge technology that the other one does not. Who would have thought in 2006 that Youtube.com would decide the Virginia Senate race, and therefore give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate?

David Plouffe, a senior advisor to Obama, explains why November, 2010 "doesn't need to be a nightmare for Democrats," if they have a record they can believe in and is worth fighting for.

Iranian Revolution Is Twittered, and You Tube'd As Mainstream Media Coverage Fails

Watch this on Youtube.com

Despite Iranian officials' best efforts to shut down free speech coverage of the election, dramatic communication continues via Twitter and You tube and BLOG. Though U.S. cable news coverage of the Iranian elections (especially CNN) has been LOUSY, blog coverage is GREAT.  AndrewSullivan.com is offering fascinating dispatches. He observes:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

The authorities may crush the revolt and the yearning for democracy. But, as Sullivan points out, "the genie has escaped this Islamist bottle."

New Right Learns from Obama, Organizing Activism Through Social Networks

"By the standards of the Obama campaign or MoveOn.org, the (anti-tax) Tea Parties happening all across the country are not very organized," writes conservative online activist Patrick Ruffini. "The lack of coordination is a sign of a still-young movement that's just learning to organize online in earnest."

Update: Nate Silver, the inestimable political numbers man at FiveThirtyEight.com who has no ax to grind, did a fairly sophisticated count of more than 300,000 protesters across the country on April 15, 2009. (An estimated 30,000 Americans showed up at February rallies around the country, Washington Post reported.)

Mass email lists are less powerful than they were a few years ago. The only stuff that's forwarded in a mass way are humor and outrageous, scurrilous memes such as "Obama's a Muslim."

With viral distribution through Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, it's a lot easier to get a message out from an organizational baseline of zero. Riffing off Clay Shirky, it's the power of organizing without organizations. In the Age of Email, those who could aggregate large lists had all the advantages when it comes to organizing. This is still somewhat true, but word can spread faster through networks of influentials with hundreds and thousands of Twitter followers than it can one-to-many through a large list.

Drill Deeper:

• Social Media, Social Networks, Online Neighborhoods and Electronic Democracy Blog
• Google search: impact of anti-tax tea parties
• http://www.herecomeseverybody.org

Fundraising from Cell Phones Shows Promise for Nonprofits

2008 was the first year it was possible to make donations via cell phone. The new tool made an impressive debut. More than 100,000 new donors gave half a million dollars in $5 and $10 donations through the Mobile Giving Foundation, or Mgive.com. Mobile giving outperformed the first year of online donations in 1997, according to an Mgive press release. (Much more about giving via mobile phone here.)

Online donations have grown from a mere $300,000 in 1997 to $10.44 billion in 2008. The precedent-shattering model in 2008 was, of course, the Obama campaign, which raised $500 million online from 3 million donors. Six million of the 6.5 million donations received were $100 or less. That last link is to Ted Hart's presentation on online fundraising.

Another innovation is to use Facebook to identify potential donors. The Nature Conservancy in 2008 set up a Facebook Cause page and a fan page, and members helped the organization raise $48,000 on Facebook in six months.

How Will New Online Organizers Help Obama Govern and Help the Country?

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama built an electronic database of more than three million donors and more than 10 million supporters and volunteers. He created the largest field organization in the history of American politics. Now he's mulling how to use this network to govern. "Just imagine what happens when a congressman comes back to his district and 500 people are lined up for his town hall meeting because they got an e-mail from Obama urging them to attend," said Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, which designed Obama's campaign Web site and change.gov. -- "On Obama Team, Web Is Key Player," Associated Press.

Christopher Haas, one of the Obama headquarters bloggers at http://my.barackobama.com, has continued to post daily since the election, sparking hundreds of comments. On November 14, he posted the video above. On November 13, he quoted from Obama's election night victory speech:

"Above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years – block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand."

Within a few days of the election, the Obama transition team had set up www.change.gov, to keep people abreast of the transition, of jobs available in the new administration, and to provide a forum for citizens to tell their stories of working in the campaign and their vision "for what America can be, where President-Elect Obama should lead this country."

In the long run, what will be fascinating is how Obama's experience as a community organizer and his campaign's powerful use of community organizing will be used to bring about a more responsive democracy. I've thought that what John Edwards tried to do, build online communities for real-world action, to "offer a helping hand, lift up our fellow citizens, and build the one America we all believe in..." might be one model for Obama's volunteers and community organizers moving forward. Edwards' One Corps partnered with Second Harvest to deliver food items to the needy, and set a goal of a monthly day of action. (The idea was aborted when Edwards' campaign ended.)

Another idea is to create something like the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps as a way to combat rising unemployment.

Zack Exley, a pioneer in online organizing, offered a hint of what's to come when he took a close look at the Obama campaign's Internet operation for The Huffington Post:

The "New Organizers" have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so "top-down" and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or "bottom-up" organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization. Win or lose, "The New Organizers" have already transformed thousands of communities—and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation." Read the whole thing.

Related:

• Diary of an Obama field organizer

Optimists Vs. Pessimists On How Internet is Changing Society

Fascinating evaluation of recent books and articles. Which side do you think makes the more compelling case?

Related:

• Internet Takes Us Back to the Future
• A Political Reawakening: Internet Takes Us Back to the Future

Electronic Democracy: Next Step Is To Build Online Structures That Mirror Real-Life Political Structure

The Personal Democracy Forum is a annual gathering of (this year in New York) more than a thousand bloggers, online activists, Internet advocates, and digital journalists. It's also a movement, writes Matt Leighninger, author of The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance -- and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same. The Internet, in his words, has irrevocably changed the way "candidates raise money, recruit volunteers, and reach voters," and "the ways in which people meet their neighbors, talk about public problems and opportunities, organize activities, and interact with local officials."

"Online technology," Leigninger writes, "can bring the political system closer to the people, can dramatically enlarge the number and diversity of people who participate in public life, and can help them participate in much more intensive and productive ways."

Andrew Rasiej, founder of PDF, says the organization's mission is to "reinvent democracy for the 21st century." It started in 2004. Back then, "people didn't understand what personal democracy meant," Rasiej told ABC News. "By 2008, with the pervasiveness of the Web with platforms like Facebook and MySpace and YouTube, it's obvious that you can be involved in political life in a meaningful way by using the Internet to inform yourself, to share your opinion and more importantly, to organize with others to change results."

At PDF online, you can sign up, and through an online community, "meet the people who are making that change happen, discover the tools powering the new civic conversation, spot the early trends, and share in understanding and embracing this dynamic new force."

Though I have not yet attended a meeting of PDF, I've been intrigued and involved in electronic democracy efforts since the mid-1990s. To me, the next step in creating a new democracy online is to build online structures that mirror real-life civic and political structures, but in ways that are flexible,  fluid, intuitive and understandable enough to encourage participation AND accountability.

That means:

• every NEIGHBORHOOD with an online forum or email list, a Facebook directory, and neighborhood-based bloggers.
• civic and party activists and precinct workers who electronically identify their allies in each neighborhood, meet face-to-face, listen to each other, discuss and debate and mobilize on local , statewide and national issues, are aware of who in the neighborhood needs a nudge to vote in primary and general elections. These cyber-precinct workers or ward-healers are tied into online databases like the Voter Activation Network (VAN), and work together on letter-writing campaigns, get out the vote efforts, and other forums of civic activism and engagement. Alliances are fluid: two people who may be in the same political party and who work together on a national political campaign may take opposite positions on local issues, and vice versa. Two people who may take diametrically opposed positions on national political issues may agree passionately on local issues. That is the essence of democracy and why civility and mutual respect must rule. 
• these neighborhood-based online groups tie into city and county-wide online communities, which in turn tie into statewide multi-user blogs that are managed by journalists and seek to be a fair  representation of opinion in the state.
• the city and county-wide online communities in turn link to, tie in to and have representatives of a plethora of national political campaigns and civic organizations and networks, so that a citizen can enter the online democracy at any point in the loose-knit structure and begin to engage on the local, statewide or national level.
• Inevitably, citizens will find that their voice is heard most easily at the most local level. Online as well as off, government and civic entities are most likely to be most responsive on the local level.

Building electronic democracy is about civic engagement. It is not a partisan exercise, though the political parties and advocacy groups that best build and utilize online networks and structures and PARTICIPATE will probably have the most success off line, in the real world.

Drill Deeper:

• Online Neighborhoods Recreate Village Atmosphere
• Skype Teleconferences Bring Leaders Closer to the People

Internet: Key to Obama's Primary...and General Election Victories?

Given the closeness of the Democratic nomination contest, there can be little doubt that the Obama campaign's superior use of the Internet to organize supporters in key states (or to allow them to self-organize online) and to inspire an unprecedented 1.5 million donors to give more than $265.4 million (through the end of April) was a key factor in his victory.

If I were a McCain supporter, I would be deeply worried by my candidate's lack of Internet savvy (he doesn't even use a computer), as revealed in this Personal Democracy Forum clip, in which an advisor defends McCain by saying "he's AWARE of the Internet." On Facebook and MySpace, Obama has six times more supporters than McCain does (Obama has more than a million supporters on Facebook alone), but McCain's advisors don't seem to care: "We don't need Facebook; they're not our voters," one advisor told the PDF.

If Obama wins in November, the Internet is likely to have been as important if not more important to his victory as television was to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Drill Deeper:

• Is This the Fated Internet Election?
• Obama's Organization and the Future of American Politics, by Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum
• Republicans admit Obama is winning online (UK Guardian)
• "Obama's Secret Digital Weapon: Blue State helped create the Web machine that brought in the bucks and built the buzz. Now it's looking to sign up more corporate clients," in Business Week.
• "Will Obama Feel the Sting of Social Networking?" by Mike Stark
• "A Glimpse at the Obama Web" by Politico.com
• "Can McCain Compete With Obama Online?" by Politico.com